A blog for fans of intelligent horror in fiction and film. Look here for reviews, analysis, and practical information on how to deal with demons and live with the living dead.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

The Cabin In The Woods

It is very hard to say anything
about The Cabin in the Woods without
giving nearly everything away.So:

SPOILER ALERT!

I will issue another alert near
the end of this review.I plead in my
defense that the hype preceding the film gave most of this away anyhow.

If you are a horror movie fan
and you have been thinking that what we really need is a unified field theory
of the surreal estate on which all the creepily ugglies creep, you are about to
be satisfied.Such a unified field
theory of horror land would need to answer two questions.

Most horror stories are
strictly local in focus: this is something happening to these people in this
old dark house.Almost all such stories
have radical implications for the larger world in which they take place.If Michael Myers shows up in Haddonfield, he
can show up in your town.A world with
one genuine vampire in it is a world in which vampires and presumably all the
other supernatural creepily ugglies are possible.Now: what would a world be like that could
contain all the monsters than inhabit
all the tales?

Second, subgenres of horror
story telling are notoriously fond of certain formulas.The ‘cabin in the woods’ story line is
reproduced dozens if not hundreds of times a year.It is nearly always the same story: a group
of five or more young men and women go on an outing and get more than they
bargained for.The group almost always
contains the same set of characters: the good girl and the slut, the jock and
the nerd, etc.Suppose for a moment that
all of these stories actually happen just so in different places.What would explain the recurring events and
patterns?

The Cabin in the Woods answers both questions.The film cuts back and forth between our
doomed party animals and a bunch of bureaucrats in some unspecified government
installation.We gradually learn that
what is about to happen to the former is orchestrated by the latter.Cue the monsters.While horror emerges followed by gore in the
cabin, the bureaucrats go about their business in a perfectly businesslike
manner.They even have an office pool on
which haunted object the victims will activate and thus determine what kind of
horror engulfs them.

Better yet, this operation is going
on simultaneously in several nations around the globe.While the jock and the whore try to get in
some quality time in the woods (is that something horrible staggering toward
them?) Japanese school girls in their identical uniforms are running screaming
from a ghost with straight black hair, and some Swedes are running from giant
trolls.

Why, you might ask, do modern
governments need ministries of supernatural atrocities?Isn’t it obvious? They keep the demons below
the earth from rising and slaughtering everyone.This is demonology reduced to public
administration.Civil servants with
degrees and maybe a little accounting have replaced druid priests.Administering the ritual at several locations
simultaneously is supposed to make sure that at least one of the efforts
succeeds.

It has to be done just so at
certain specified times, as is the way with rituals.That explains why the cabin in the woods
story happens over and over again and why the same type of people have to die
in roughly the same order.One of the
bureaucrats casually explains that the virgin’s death is optional, as long as…

We also learn why the horror
world has the set of deadly monsters that it does.Below the operations center is a large
menagerie of demons, ghosts, zombies, etc. in tidy technologically secure boxes,
all ready to be sent into action as the ritual requires.

This is pure brilliance.The entire horror genre is managed, both
literally and figuratively, in such a way as to fit in one narrative
context.All the recurring story lines
and characters fit neatly into the scheme.It surely ranks as one of the greatest homages to the spooky story ever
attempted.

SECOND SPOILER ALERT: I AM
ABOUT TO GIVE AWAY THE ENDING.

There is a serious reflection
on modern bureaucracy hidden behind all the clever plotting and context.The geeks running monster central think they
have everything covered.While directing
the murder of innocents and determining the fate of man on earth, they discuss
ball games and plan barbeques.As long
as things seem to be going according to the agenda, they are absurdly
confident.Perhaps this is merely their
way of dealing with the stress of the job.It does set them up for disaster on the day when a lot of things go
wrong at once.

Of course everything does go
wrong.At the end, the two survivors
(the virgin and the nerd) are faced with a choice.If the nerd does not sacrifice his life,
everyone dies.In a moment of
existential irresponsibility, they decide that mankind is not worth
saving.

Bureaucracies are essential to
civilization.When they work well, they
provide security and plenty for plenty of folks.However, they do not allow for and even
discourage heroism.The more people who
are willing to sacrifice others for the sake of the system, the fewer will be
people who are willing to sacrifice themselves for anything more important than
themselves.The Cabin in the Woods is very funny and not so funny at all.It is the sort of thing you will love if you
love that sort of thing.You could do
worse for a Halloween night, days away from an election.